


Morning Lessons

by Anonymous



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Developing Relationship, M/M, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:27:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24553099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Nightingale insisting I finish my Latin homework before he slept with me that morning was cruel enough. Nightingale doing his best to distract me while I was trying to do said homework was simply unfair.
Relationships: Peter Grant/Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 2
Kudos: 72
Collections: Anonymous, Fandom 5K 2020





	Morning Lessons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reine_des_corbeaux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/gifts).



It’s strange how much you realise you didn’t know about a person you’ve lived with for years and thought you knew quite well at this point, once you grow even closer to them. Which was a very old-fashioned, euphemistic way of saying that ever since Nightingale and I had stumbled into bed together – soaked through from the rain, wet and miserable and exhausted from hunting a black dog all through the Cornish countryside for days, elated with finally putting an end to the haunting and probably far less concerned with whether anyone could hear us in the little village bed and breakfast we were staying at – we hadn’t exactly stopped doing just that.

We probably should have. Of course we should have. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that it had happened, considering how often one of us almost died, and how every time that happened it became harder to deal with. Because I’d long ago stopped worrying about my boss and magic teacher dying when pretty much my whole future and career depended on him being around, and started worrying about … probably the most important person in my life outside of my family. And there’d been moments long before that day, when I’d watched him indulge in a rare smoke after a long case and couldn’t stop thinking about his lips around the thin white filter, when he’d squeezed my shoulder too hard and his hand had lingered and he’d looked at me like he was about to do something really reckless, moments that felt like something was about to happen no matter how much it shouldn’t. Maybe the most surprising thing was that we’d been sensible enough not to do anything for so long.

Still, it clearly should have been a once in a lifetime mistake. Sleeping with your boss has never been a good idea under any circumstances, and the specific circumstances between Nightingale and me only made it worse in so many ways. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to care – not that night in that little Cornish room, our skin damp with rain and his lips so impatient on mine I thought he’d wanted to eat me alive, not in the morning when he’d offered a stiff, awkward apology and looked so miserable during it that I’d kissed him to shut him up. And not when we’d returned to London and I managed to go a grand total of two nights before I’d knocked on his bedroom door. We’d barely spoken a word that night – Nightingale had just looked at me and beckoned me closer and I’d jumped into his bed so fast the old wood creaked worryingly.

The truth was that all those good reasons why we shouldn’t didn’t feel like they applied all that much to us. So what if Nightingale was my boss and a terrifying force of nature – he was hardly pressuring me into anything, never mind that I probably would have liked it if he had. If anything, he was almost too careful with me. And whatever worries I’d had that first night that maybe I wouldn’t actually _like_ sleeping with a man, no matter how often I thought about Nightingale looking fantastic in those tailored suits of his, well, those worries had lasted up until his lips wrapped around my cock and then later those sounds he’d made when I’d touched him back.

Which was one of those things that I never would have suspected about Thomas Nightingale, gentleman wizard and casual destroyer of tiger tanks: he was _loud_ in bed. Up until then, even during that first kiss, I hadn’t been entirely sure just how comfortable Nightingale would be with any of that. Even in my generation a lot of guys still beat themselves up about being gay (or bi, who knew, I hadn’t actually asked him, because we very much did not talk about any of this), and Nightingale had grown up at a time when pretty much everything we’d done with each other that night had been illegal. And not slap-on-the-wrist illegal, but ruin-your-life illegal. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d been shy or awkward or uncertain, not that I’d ever seen Nightingale be shy about anything.

I’d said something along those lines after that first time, when he’d kissed me and I’d tasted my come in his mouth, and he’d given me the most filthily mischievous look I’d ever seen on his face. Or possibly on anyone’s face. He’d simply laughed, more relaxed than I’d ever heard him before, and said, “You clearly don’t know much about the 20s, Peter.”

The truth was that Nightingale was a lot less embarrassed about all of this than I was, which I put entirely on the fact that up until I’d met him, I’d somehow managed to be mostly convinced I was straight. I blamed his suits, and the way his eyes twinkled when he was about to do something very reckless and very cool, and maybe also the fact that meeting him had changed my life. You didn’t walk away from that and somehow manage to stay in denial that there were at least _some_ men you found attractive.

Another thing I only found out once we were back in London was how much he liked to smoke afterwards. He’d mentioned to me once that he’d quit some years back, mostly because Abdul had kept showing him pictures of lung cancer and Nightingale had grown quite tired of it, but apparently this was one indulgence he let himself have. I didn’t really mind, because it meant I got to watch him from his bed: standing naked by the open window so the smoke wouldn’t end up in the room. It was quite the view – the lines of his back and his arse, the way he slowly breathed in like he savoured every bit of smoke in his lungs, the way he smiled when he breathed out. 

I’d never been a fan of the smell or the taste, but I realised that I didn’t mind it with him once he returned to bed. It somehow fit everything else about him, mingled with that old-fashioned cologne he always wore, and it was all too easy to imagine a younger Nightingale in black tie, sprawled out in the Folly’s smoking room while chatting with his friends. Or maybe dancing away the nights at some 20s jazz clubs he’d apparently frequented far more often than I would have suspected. More carefree times, and I found myself briefly wishing I’d known him then. Not that I would have wanted to live in the 20s, mind you, when I definitely couldn’t have become either a copper or Nightingale’s apprentice – I just would have liked to meet that Nightingale, the way he’d been before the war and time had taken away almost everyone he cared about. It was a useless, wistful thought, and I usually tried not to linger on it for too long.

Either way, over the past two weeks, since we’ve returned from London, I’d found out all sorts of things about him. There was still something tentative about all of this, like we both expected the other one to come to his senses any day now and put a stop to it. I wasn’t going to because coming to my senses wasn’t exactly my strong suit, but I dreaded that Nightingale might – whether out of some old-fashioned sense of nobility or out of a rare concern for modern-day rules about superiors abusing their authority. Maybe I shouldn’t have, because he seemed more relaxed than I’d ever seen him before, but I couldn’t help worrying. And in the meantime, I soaked up all those small things.

The way his hair looked when he woke up in the morning (terrible – that neat side part of his must take him no small amount of effort – although I quite liked the way it started to curl at the back of his neck when he was sweating). How rough his voice sounded when he was sleepy, his diction no less posh than usual, but the harshness made him sound even more like a movie villain. Apparently I was into that when it was him, especially when he whispered into my ear and I found out that Nightingale had a really, really hot way of saying “fuck”. Because I couldn’t put my reaction to that just on the fact that he’d had his hand on my cock at that very moment.

I had a feeling I still didn’t know about half the things he was into, though, because Nightingale had been nothing but embarrassingly considerate about this all. Maybe it had been pretty obvious that I didn’t exactly have heaps of experience in the area, and I wondered if Nightingale was kind of used to that, from a time when most of his “dalliances” or whatever he would have called it might have been with men who very much didn’t want to make a habit of something that could get them into so much trouble. It had taken me a fair amount of courage to return the favour and suck his cock, although the result had been so, so worth it. His fingers had twitched in my hair like he was trying very hard not to pull on it, and if I’d thought him loud before, his moans now were probably the hottest thing I’d ever heard. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Nightingale truly lose control until that night.

But the really strange thing was how comfortable it soon became. You’d think with the fact that we were both about as emotionally open as you’d expect from your average Englishman, we’d continue to be awkward about it, but the truth was that we were both quite comfortable not talking about this at all and pretending everything was quite normal. We worked together as before – although things had been fairly quiet since we’d returned from Cornwall, which mostly meant that I was stuck catching up on paperwork while Nightingale enjoyed being the boss and leaving all the paperwork to me –, I did my magic practice and my Latin translations and my reading, we went out to dinner and talked about the same things we’d talked about before, and occasionally we’d sit in the coach house together while he watched rugby and I didn’t comment on the fact that I thought I finally understood now just why that sport appealed to him so much (he did seem to have a bit of a thing for muscular thighs, that much I’d noticed pretty quickly).

And then in the evening I joined him in his room, still not entirely used to seeing him out of a suit, and then he pretty much blew my mind every time. It didn’t take me very long until I’d moved a couple of things into his bedroom – a charger for my phone, the reports I was working on, even one of my Latin books. As it turned out, Nightingale was the fall-asleep-after-sex(-and-a-cigarette)-type, while I was usually up for another hour, and as much as I enjoyed the view, at some point I started to feel a little creepy watching him sleep. (I wasn’t entirely sure what Nightingale did in the mornings when he was up before me – reading, possibly, but for some reason when I asked him he just grinned and shrugged. At some point in the last years, I’d started to suspect that Nightingale wasn’t just tight-lipped, he actually took a perverse joy in sometimes not answering my questions.)

The first Sunday we spent together in bed was just as comfortable – I’d only slipped out of the room to get us both some tea (I had a feeling Molly knew exactly what was going on, because she’d immediately stopped bringing Nightingale his morning tea to his bedroom), and then right back into bed because it was October and the heating in the Folly was _questionable_. I’d brought Nightingale the newspaper so he’d have something to do while I was finishing up the Latin translations I’d been thoroughly ignoring all weekend. I’m not sure why I did him a favour like that, because the only reason I was doing my Latin homework in bed was because Nightingale had pushed me back when I’d tried to kiss him and insisted I finish it first.

“Now that’s an abuse of authority, sir. You can’t bribe me into doing my Latin homework with sex,” I’d said, but he’d shrugged and I’d gone to work. It definitely wasn’t fair, but Nightingale didn’t play fair. Certainly not when he’d mumbled into my ear that he’d make it up to me later.

The problem was that, while I was fighting a particularly convoluted sentence that made me wonder if the author’s goal had been to include as many irregular verb forms as possible, Nightingale was exceedingly distracting. I’d thrown on t-shirt and shorts to get us tea, but he was still naked beside me. Besides the faint scars on his upper body – the one on his shoulder from the first year of our acquaintance being the newest, and the others had stories I hadn’t dared to ask about yet, although I’d definitely taken my time mapping them with my lips – there were a few marks I’d left on him the night before. A bite mark on his shoulder, another one at the very base of his throat, some bruises on his hips where I’d grabbed him too tightly. At first I’d worried about how easily he bruised, but if anything Nightingale seemed to like it, so I’d stopped trying to hold back.

I’d always realised that Nightingale was confident, and a little vain, but I’d never known just how aware he was of his looks until that morning. He shifted in the most minute ways, barely moving and still making the muscles under his pale skin twitch in the most distracting ways. One time he even adjusted his half-hard cock with such a relaxed, casual gesture that I completely lost any focus on my Latin for the next five minutes.

And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, he eventually grew bored of the newspaper (though, to be honest, I wasn’t sure how seriously he’d been reading it in the first place) and rolled over onto his side, slipping one hand underneath the hem of my t-shirt. It was such a small touch, but it still sent a shiver up my spine – I’d been a little worked up ever since waking up, which I considered entirely normal when sleeping next to Nightingale, and any touch from his slender fingers set my nerves on fire, even if all he did was caress my back lightly.

“You’re not helping,” I said and frowned at my Latin. Something didn’t look right about the last few words I’d scribbled down, mostly because the sentence didn’t make any sense no matter how desperately I tried to make it.

“Hm, that very much isn’t an accusative, Peter,” Nightingale said just as I had the same realisation. His voice had that low, rough morning rumble despite the first cup of tea, and he leant over to kiss my shoulder as he looked down at the page. 

“I know that, but – I thought you wanted me to finish this!” I couldn’t keep the frustration out of my voice.

Nightingale had started nuzzling my neck – his cheeks were a little scratchy in the mornings, and that was something I’d found out about myself, that I apparently really, really liked that. The roughness was such a pleasant contrast to his warm breath and his soft lips, and Nightingale had a way of placing such light kisses onto my skin that it always made me desperate for more. All that morning sex – a big advantage of not having any truly important active cases for which we’d have to be up and about as early as possible – left me walking around with almost permanent stubble burn on my neck and my thighs. It wasn’t visible on my skin, but I felt it, especially when my clothes rasped over it.

“Oh, I do,” Nightingale said against my skin. “Consider it a concentration exercise?” 

I snorted out a brief bout of laughter. Nightingale did so love those, although what he usually meant was magic boxing – focusing on maintaining my formae while dodging his impressively fast fists, and I had to admit that Nightingale’s rigorous training had saved my life a few times at this point. I didn’t think the ability to remember Latin declensions while getting my neck kissed was an equally useful life skill. I told him as much, and the warm puff of laughter against my neck made my chest tighten. I didn’t think I’d heard Nightingale laugh half as much in the past years I’d known him as in these two weeks.

“You never know,” he said. I made another valiant attempt at focusing on what I was doing, but at this point the letters in front of my eyes might as well have been Greek for all that I managed to read them, because Nightingale’s hand had dipped lower, underneath the loose fabric of my shorts, pulling them down just below the curve of my arse. I must have looked a bit silly like that, and feeling his gaze on me brought heat to my cheeks, but my embarrassment never did anything to lessen how much I wanted him. There was something ridiculously hot about how much he was into my arse (it wasn’t _just_ my thighs, even Nightingale wasn’t that old-fashioned) – he’d never done anything I hadn’t tried out before, but he did love touching it, grabbing it when he pulled me close, caressing it the way he did now. I had a feeling there were some other things he’d very much like to do to it, but he’d been gentlemanly about not mentioning it, and I hadn’t worked up the courage to suggest it either. I wasn’t quite sure yet if I even wanted to.

“Any progress?” he asked, and it took me a moment to realise that he meant my translation. I could barely even remember which sentence I’d been on. 

“Are you serious?” I asked, and then I gasped when he gave my arse a light smack. It hadn’t been much – more playful than anything else, but I still jumped a little, and to my surprise my cock twitched against the sheets. I felt Nightingale looking at me, a slight frown on his face like he was wondering if I’d minded, but it didn’t last long when I smiled at him.

“Really, are you going to spank me for not doing my Latin when you’re the one keeping me from doing it in the first place?” I laughed a little, tried to think about Nightingale being a tease and not about how my skin tingled, how his warm hand still rested in the same place he’d just smacked. I’d never had anyone spank me before – it wouldn’t have occurred to me that it’d be something I’d like, and none of the women I’d ever slept with had suggested it either. But Nightingale had always been an exception to so many rules for me.

“You could have done it yesterday,” he said in a rather stern tone, but his eyes were full of mischief. That look in them _definitely_ made me wish I’d known him as a young man. If this was him at a hundred and something, I shuddered to think what he’d been like at twenty. Probably an absolute menace.

“Yes, but you didn’t say I had to – is that what they did in your day?”

He let out a thoughtful hum and pressed another kiss to my neck. “In my day it would have been a cane rather than a hand, but I’m not sure you’d enjoy that.”

I made a face because I clearly hadn’t been thinking at all, at least not with my brain. Nightingale sounded so casual when he said things like that that it made me angry. Not at him – I’d certainly never heard him defend corporal punishment or bemoaning that it was frowned upon these days – but at the people who’d raised him, because he sounded so utterly accepting every time he mentioned it. I’d never pushed him, but I had a feeling if I did, he’d probably shrug and say it hadn’t really done him any harm. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about while I was in bed with him.

“I definitely wouldn’t,” I said, not that I had any idea what I was talking about at the time (it turned out, much later, that I did actually enjoy the cane just as much – you’re never too old to find out new things about yourself, right?). “But … you’re right, I definitely could have done my Latin yesterday. That was. Er. Very bad of me?”

My cheeks were so on fire that I felt like he had to notice, even knowing that he couldn’t see it, and I desperately hoped that he caught my meaning. There was no way in hell I was going to _ask_ him to spank me like an unruly Edwardian schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. No. Way. (It turned out I’d been just as mistaken about that, though not that very morning. But eventually … Nightingale most certainly did make me ask for it.)

“You could have,” Nightingale agreed. He was squeezing my arse, the gesture oddly possessive, and I found myself rubbing against the sheets. “I have been quite lenient with you, wouldn’t you agree? I wouldn’t want to neglect my responsibilities as your teacher because of our … personal involvement.”

And apparently Nightingale could make those words sound filthy as hell, or maybe at this point my brain was just not thinking about anything else anymore and he could have been lecturing me on the finer points of Latin grammar and it would have turned me on. I gave up trying to stare at my translation and put the book and my notes on the nightstand, before they’d end up crumpled and messy. Once again his hand stroked my arse, and this time his thumb dipped between my cheeks, just brushing over sensitive skin and making me shudder. He’d stayed away from there, mostly, as if he was afraid of spooking me – which, fair enough, he might definitely have spooked me, but right now it just felt dizzyingly good. I made a protesting noise when he stopped and sat up.

He probably would have looked more intimidating if he’d been dressed instead of naked and slightly mauled, but then I probably also would have been a lot more freaked out by what was going on if that had been the case. And he looked good naked, all that lean muscle, his strong legs stretched out, and then he went and patted his own thigh invitingly. Somehow up until then I had expected that he’d want me to stay lying where I was, not literally put me over his lap.

I flushed even more, if that was even possible, and gave him what was probably a very wide-eyed look.

“Come now, no need to make this difficult.” His tone was still stern, but there was still that playful glimmer in his eyes. I knew without a doubt that he wouldn’t mind if I backed down now (oh, he’d _mind_ , but he wouldn’t be annoyed or angry with me), that if I laughed it off now and simply climbed in his lap to kiss him, he’d gladly let me and kiss me back and probably never mention again how much I’d jumped under that smack of his hand. I knew that, and that was probably a big part of why, despite all my embarrassment, I moved awkwardly over to lay down on his lap.

He helped me get comfortable, and the sheets at the edge of the bed were soothingly cool against my burning cheeks. It was a strange position, but surprisingly comfortable – his thighs under my hip, my cock pressed against his warm skin, his hand soothingly stroking my arse and pushing my shorts further down. I didn’t even want to know what I looked like, half-dressed and sprawled out like that, but judging by how hard Nightingale was against me, he clearly liked what he saw.

I smiled a little against the sheets – I had been pretty sure that Nightingale was into a lot more things than he’d let on so far, but somehow I hadn’t really thought he’d be kinky. And okay, I’m well aware that spanking is not exactly some kind of outlandish fetish, even today, but in that moment, with Nightingale looking down at me and holding me right there in his lap, it felt very naughty.

“I’d ask you how much you can take, but I don’t believe you know that yourself, do you?” Nightingale asked me casually. His voice sounded quite firm again, not as sleepy and relaxed as before. He sounded the way he did when he interrogated suspects or did his whole “I am the Nightingale, do you really want to put my reputation to the test?” thing. It had been one of the very first things I’d found hot about him, so it didn’t surprise me at all that my cock twitched against his thigh.

He smacked my arse lightly, and I realised only then that he’d actually wanted a reply and I’d been too distracted to give him one.

“I, er, no,” I said awkwardly. I briefly wondered who else Nightingale might have done this with – some _dear friends_ from the Folly? Other stiff-lipped toffs at a special kind of gentlemen’s club? Or anonymous strangers on graveyards? I really hoped it wasn’t the latter, because that idea was just depressing. Another light smack brought me back to the here and now. Both my cheeks felt quite warm, especially once Nightingale took a few moments to squeeze and grope them.

“Are you getting distracted, sir?” I asked, and I added that last word very deliberately. I didn’t manage to call him Thomas no matter how often he offered – and he’d offered a few times since I’d started sleeping with him – but most of the time I just didn’t call him anything in bed. But right now … it felt appropriate, and it made his breath hitch a little in a way I really liked.

“Don’t worry, Peter, I’m very, ah, focused on the task at hand.”

Before I could come up with some witty reply to that, he brought his right hand down on my arse with a loud, heavy thwack. My whole body twitched, and it was probably a good thing his other hand on the small of my back was holding me down or I would have arched off the bed. And I very much didn’t want to get away from his hand, because. Well. Because. Nightingale clearly hadn’t mistaken my moan for anything but what it was, because he did it again, on the other cheek this time.

I was more prepared for the second slap, so I held still and felt it reverberate through my flesh. It was a strange kind of pain, different from getting hurt in most ways I’d experienced. There was that first sharp sting, but then it quickly turned into a numb warmth that spread through my nerves instead of remaining concentrated in one spot. 

By the third slap I was rocking against his thigh in time with the slaps, my cock hard and trapped between my own body and his, the friction maddeningly good. My hands were clenching the sheets, mostly because I couldn’t figure out a non-awkward way of touching him right now. After a few more Nightingale gave me a break, though I didn’t know if it was out of concern or to tease me, and at that point I was too far gone to be all that embarrassed by the protesting groan that left my throat or the way I squirmed in his lap like a horny teenager who couldn’t hold back.

It didn’t feel like much of a punishment at all, if anything this felt like an encouragement to keep stalling on my Latin if it brought out this particular side of Nightingale. I tried to tell him as much, but after the first two gasped words I gave up on talking and just pressed my face into the sheets again. It wasn’t as if Nightingale couldn’t have guessed what I was thinking, the way I was humping his thigh.

I lost count after the first half dozen slaps he rained down on me – I wasn’t sure if he was counting either, if he had any specific plan in mind or, more likely, if he was simply figuring out how long I would enjoy this, how much more I might want. He gave me a breather every now and then – lighter slaps that simply prickled pleasantly on my reddened skin, slow caresses that made me think he was done before the next slap made me flinch, and a few times his hand moved lower for a few well-placed hits on the back of my thighs. Those burnt far more than the ones on my arse, a sharper, less obviously pleasant kind of pain, but it served as a nice contrast to the comfortable heat burning in my skin.

I was so distracted by how good it all felt, the heightened sensations, the pain building up so slowly it never went from dizzying to actually unpleasant, that it almost took me by surprise when I came. Compared to what his hand had been doing to me, rubbing off against his thigh had felt downright normal. I hadn’t realised just how close I had been, and I got almost as loud as Nightingale when I came all over his thigh. He delivered a last, stinging slap on my arse just at the height of it and I shivered through my orgasm like he’d done who knew what to me.

After that he stopped – I wasn’t sure I wanted him to, but I also wasn’t sure I could take more of it. My skin was burning, still comfortably so, but also in a way that made me hope I wouldn’t have to spend too much time on hard chairs over the next few days. For a little while, I didn’t know how long, I simply lay there while his very warm hand petted my aching skin. Every now and then he shifted a bit, his cock hard against the side of my stomach, and sometimes it still made me grin like an idiot that I got him so worked up. Nightingale, who usually seemed so untouchable and in control of himself, and all I had to do was squirm a little and his breath caught in his throat.

Eventually I half turned on his lap so I could look up at him, finding his face as flushed as mine felt and his lips parted breathlessly.

“I think it’d be more effective if you promised to do this if I actually finish my Latin on time, rather than when I don’t,” I said, and his brief laugh almost sounded almost relieved. As if there could have been any doubt about how much I’d been enjoying myself. I grinned. “If I didn’t know you hadn’t, I would suspect you were using magic. Because. Yeah.”

I was still impressively comfortable on his lap, but I was starting to feel a bit selfish here, so I forced myself to … not quite sit up, really, but stretch out my legs beside his and curl a little around him so I could get my hand on his cock, and even that light touch got me a very gratifying gasp.

“There actually are some … interesting applications of magic,” he said, and I would have been lying if I’d never wondered about that before, but he’d certainly never mentioned it to me until then.

“Can you teach me?” I asked immediately and he laughed.

“It requires a degree of fine control that I’m afraid you don’t quite possess yet, Peter. And probably won’t for several years.” He fell silent, and I thought that was all he’d say on the matter. Which was fine because he was clearly as distracted as I’d been earlier. He had one hand in my hair, not quite pulling or prodding – the way he touched me was really more like a polite request, as if he hadn’t just spanked the living daylights out of me. Still, I could get a hint and leant in closer to kiss the tip of his cock. 

Just before I could take it into my mouth – fortunately, because a second later I would have choked on it – Nightingale said, his voice breathless with want and still that hint of mischief I was quickly starting to fear and long for, “But I could of course offer a demonstration.”

I took him in my mouth because I absolutely didn’t trust my voice to sound even halfway normal instead of absurdly eager, but he clearly got my meaning.

Somehow I didn’t think I would find any time for my Latin translation that Sunday.


End file.
